Targeted advertising has long been a goal of the companies who place and pay for advertisements. Advertisements can be expensive in any medium. Thus, companies generally would like to pay only for advertisements that will be viewed by a group of individuals likely to be interested in that company's goods or services.
Over the Internet, one form of advertisement is a paid placement for a search result in a search engine. In these systems, advertisers may choose to offer a different amount for having an advertisement listed in search results for a specific search term and the search results returned by the search engine will be ranked among the advertisers who offer an amount for a particular search term according to the amount offered. For example, if a consumer searched on a paid listing search engine for “airline tickets,” a list of airlines is generated with corresponding URL listings so that the consumer can click on a listing and go to the website corresponding to that listing. Each advertiser associated with those listings pays the search engine a certain amount of money for every “click-through” to the advertiser's website. The higher an advertiser's name appears on the list of search results, the more likely a user will click-through to that advertiser's provided URL (e.g., it's website). Often, as the cost per click-through for the advertising company increases, the closer that company's listing is to the top of the list of search results.
While the aforementioned existing systems allow for some targeting of advertising money, such systems fail to provide other targeted advertising avenues over the Internet.
These and other drawbacks exist with current systems.